Category Archives: The Good Life

As I sit here just thinking out loud and thinking about a few things that I have been faced with in 2017 I wanted to come and write a post about something that I’ve been failing to understand…

Men want a successful woman, but just not one who is more successful than them. They want a woman who is independent but they want to feel needed. They want a woman who has money but just not more money than them.

As I exited my last relationship these were a few of the issues that I was faced with. Having someone tell me they felt inferior to me because of everything I was working hard to do and because I didn’t “need” them for anything was confusing and somewhat hurtful. Being that I’ve always believed that a woman could make more than a man, be independent and still value that man all the same, hearing something as such really left me perplexed.

Do I dim my light so that I can be with the man that I really want to be with? Do I pretend to “need” a man when my parents have taught me to be independent and make a way for myself?

One thing that I’ve never wanted for myself was to be with a man and if he leaves, I have not a pot to piss in. With me being in grad school and pursuing my MBA, it is a shot for me to make sure that I am financially secure for the rest of my life. Having my own is very important to me because then I know no one can take it away from me.

Prior to this experience I have tried to not judge others by their degrees, their financial situations and what their job titles were. I’ve always felt that if you have a good heart, you were hard working and treated me well, then you and I could be together. Now that I’ve gone through my experience, I’m beginning to realize why the Bible says we should be equally yolked. Moving forward I’ve realized that I have to pick men with credentials similar to mine, not because I’m being a snob or bougie but rather because most men can’t handle not being the financial “top dog”.

I am two weeks away from business school orientation and I feel like I have a million and one things to get done. My to do list comprises of finishing up pre-course work, back to school shopping, getting my immunization records to the school, deferring my loans, buying stuff for my new apartment, registering for “Math Camp”, doing work for the career services team, and so much more.

The pre-course workload is way heavier than I thought it would be and I’m starting to regret going on vacation and doing nothing for two weeks. Usually in situations like these I would get 1) super flustered2) just quit and say I’m not doing it and just take the 0% grade. But it’s crazy when you want something bad enough you will somehow find your inner grit, and get sh*t done. Yesterday I had a very late start to my day (my sleep pattern is way off ever since returning from vacation). I went to the library around 5pm and started doing work. I went home right before the library closed at 9pm, and kept doing work. Before I knew it, it was 2:30am! Between the hours of 5pm-2:30am I dedicated my time to my school work. Was I tired? Hell yes, but what kept me motivated was my end goal of making six figures after I graduate, and how badly I want to reach that goal.

In undergrad I wasn’t the best student, but I wasn’t the worst. When I applied myself I made Deans List 4 out of the 8 semesters I was there. I slept a lot in undergrad and hardly ever stayed up past 12am studying. If something was hard I’d bullsh*t my way through it to get a decent enough grade. Back then I was too lazy to see the importance of hard work. Fast forward to today, Ive had a 9-5 job in corporate America that I hated. I have been underpaid for most of my career and the work that I was doing was not interesting to me at all. Going through that experience really has given me the ” The Power of the Push”.

I’m not sure where I got this term from, maybe I made it up…but this is a term that has been repeating in my head over and over again since I’ve been in this season. “The Power of the Push”is what separates great from mediocre, the strong from the weak, and those who want it to those who don’t.

For most of my life I have always felt as though there are just some people who just succeed because they are simply smarter. As I navigated through corporate America, I realized that its not about smarts all the time. Its about who works harder, who wants it more, who pushes harder to get what they want. I mean a great example of this is Donald Trump. His vocabulary is limited, he isn’t well read, and he isn’t the smartest cookie in the batch but some how he has been able to elevate himself to the highest office in the United States (granted him being a white man has probably helped a lot too, lol).

My will to succeed is so strong that I can not see anything except GREAT things ahead of me. I am willing to put my blood, sweat, and tears into this. Something that I can’t say Ive been willing to do for anything in my life thus far. So as I begin my business school career I am going to promise myself to keep pushing, to not allow outside factors disrupt my grind, and to always remember the POWER of the PUSH!!!

I recently had an epiphany. In a world of sharing, perhaps there are some things that are better left unshared.

Of course with each one of my milestones and accomplishments I want to let the world know about what I’ve done, but it occurred to me that perhaps I was doing all of these things to gain some type of validation from the outside world.

I mean, is it not enough to tell my close family and friends about my accomplishments, receive a congrats text, and just be happy with that? Must I update my FB status telling all my FB friends (most of whom are people from high school that I don’t even talk to anymore) that I have done something awesome in my life? Must I put everything that I have done in my instagram bio? Must I post every picture that me and the guy that Im dating at that time online so that the world knows who I am seeing? Must I post things riddled with hashtags so people can see who I am??? (#blackgirlMagic, #RoadToMBA, #blacknomad).

These are just some of the questions that I began asking myself and I realized that moving forward I want to dial back what I show to the world and the manner in which I discuss my accomplishments.

Am I proud of myself? Yes. Do I want people to be just as excited and happy as I am about me moving forward in my life? Yes. But there is a fine line between sharing and bragging and I don’t want to cross that line.

So with that being said I went on my instagram and cleared out my bio. I deleted any pictures of me and any significant other and I decided to just keep the photos that I felt relayed a message of happiness, joy, and fun.

Every living moment of my life doesn’t have to be put on display and some precious moments are better left to those that are close to me.

It has been a while since I have posted on here and the reason being I just got super busy with life. It takes a lot of effort to keep up with a blog.
With school quickly approaching I’ve been using my free time to complete all the pre-course work and assignments they have us doing all summer. I also quit my job to ensure that I have the time to complete all the work that needs to be completed before school starts as well as I wanted some rest/down time before the chaos of school really begins.

I decided that I wanted to take a trip to decompress and relax after I became unemployed. I had been going through stresses in regards to my personal life, job life, and school life and felt as though a trip to get re-centered, recharged, and refocused would be the best thing. I decided to go and visit my family in Trinidad to do so.

My life as it is now is all about school and focusing on getting everything I need to get together by the time school starts. I am not going to lie, it has been a little overwhelming already and I feel extremely nervous to go back to school (I mean I have been out of school for 6 years), but every time I begin to feel this way I somehow push through and do what I have to do.

I will be posting a more thorough update on what has been going on in my life as well as pictures from my trip to Trinidad and my trip to Costa Rica that I never posted!

At the end of 2015, I moved back home to the Washington DC from Portsmouth, Virginia. While I was packing I realized that I had TOO many things. Too many unworn items of makeup, shoes, and mostly…too many pieces of clothing. As I packed up all my things I was extremely overwhelmed by the amount of clothes and shoes that I had. Clothes in the closet, the drawer, under my bed, in my car trunk, and in my storage unit. Some of the items were things I wore once, things that I bought just because, and things that I was just too lazy to send back. I realized then that I wanted to strive for a life of minimalism. I just had way too many things and I wanted to try to eliminate as much junk inside of my home as I was trying to eliminate within myself.

I could have just given a mass amount of my clothes away to the Good Will or Salvation Army, but I didnt want my clothes being added to a mound of clothes that is sent overseas to pile up on the side of the road somewhere (this is actually toxic to locals). So I decided that I was going to sell as many items as I could on Poshmark. Poshmark is an app that allows you to take pictures of your clothes, write a description about it, set the price that you want for the item, and sell it.

My Poshmark site

I also decide to stop buying so many clothes. We all have our vices. We all have the things that make us feel better, mine has always been buying things. Having a new outfit that someone could compliment me on was one of the things that made me feel better when I was down. Obviously this is not the best tactic in searching for peace and comfort so I decided to enforce a spending freeze on myself unless I absolutely needed it.This has been the hardest thing, but this past year I have been doing really well sticking to this plan!

The last thing that I decided to do was start wearing my old clothes again. You know how it is, we wear something for a season, discard it and never pick it back up again. Well this is something that I decided to stop doing. I have decided to start wearing my clothes until they run down and must be thrown away rather than just replacing it with a newer version just because. I cant tell you how satisfying it was for me to start back wearing an old shirt that I had purchased in 2011, and wearing it until the sleeve tore. I know this sounds super janky BUT if all of us began buying clothes only when we really needed them just think of how much money we would save a year.

Now that 2017 is approaching I am hoping that I can continue my journey to minimalism and eliminating the unnecessary out of my life. I am hoping that all of this will assist me in decreasing my materialistic ways and continue down the path of financial freedom, gratitude, and appreciation.

The day after Thanksgiving was my birthday and leading up to it I was filled with such excitement and joy. No, I wasn’t having a big birthday bash (which I never do because my friends are always out of town or with their family during Thanksgiving break) nor was I going on some special trip to celebrate. But what made me happiest about turning a year older was the fact that for the first time in my life I feel like my life is moving in the right direction, and as more time passes and the older I get, I am becoming the person that God has intended me to be. After I turned 24, I would always feel a sense of sadness and anxiety about getting older because I felt that I wasnt doing enough in my life. I would look at others and what they were doing and wish that it was me achieving more at that age. But now those feelings have been dispelled and I get filled with joy and excitement when I think about getting older and my future! I have been working on a few things that I know will make my life better and Im at the point where I just want to see the me two years from now when everything Ive been working towards come to pass.

My boyfriend didnt even know how obssessed with balloons I am, and yet he got me a whole bunch

I think I was more excited about receving balloons that getting anything else!

The year between 27 and 28 has been such an amazing journey. I have had friends and family members tell me how they have really been able to see a change in me and how proud they are of me for it. Who would have thought that a really bad break up, a crappy job and a new amazing boyfriend would have led me to have such an amazing year! A golden year at the age of 27! A year of exploration, finding myself, and finally feeling comfortable and confident in my own skin!

Im realizing now, that getting older isnt so bad if you have family and friends who love and support you. Just enjoy each part of the journey and always remember to strive to make each year GOLDEN!

As 2016 comes to an end, I can honestly say that I have had one of the best years of my life. Was it less difficult than other years? No, But it was a tremendous year of growth, self discovery, and action. With all of these things came my desire to travel more, to be more open minded and more self assured. In the last year alone I have travelled to Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Raleigh and Trinidad and Tobago. I will also be traveling back to Dallas in the next few weeks and to South Africa in December. This is the most I have traveled in a span of one year.

Prior to this year I was totting around a lot of baggage and it made it impossible for me to do the things I wanted to do such as TRAVEL. From 2013 to 2015, I was in a difficult relationship that added a massive amount of stress to my life and spiraled me into a deep depression that I did not even realize I was in. The person that I was with during those two years would use his words to break down my spirit, morale and confidence. I can’t even tell you the amount of times that he told me the that I was worthless, a horrible person and that no one but him liked me. All of these things that he said fell in to the category of him “Keeping it real”.

I was afraid to leave because I was living in a city where I knew no one except for him, his friends and his family (none of whom I liked or liked me). Some way, some how I was able to finally leave, find my own place to stay and then a month later move back home with a new job.

Part of the reason why I made it such a point to Travel More this year was because when I was in that relationship I wasn’t allowed to do anything that I wanted to do, go where I wanted to go, or discover the things I wanted to discover. As soon as I moved back home it literally felt like a weight was lifted off of my shoulders and although I had to start all over again, it felt absolutely amazing to not have that person as baggage in my life weighing me down.

The sites, the sounds, and the people that I have met this year while traveling has been amazing and so worth it. And don’t get me wrong, I am not bashing my ex or holding on to the past. What I am doing is sharing my story to encourage other young women who may be going through the same things I was going through.

I encourage anyone of you who is dealing with baggage to drop it and start living the life God has ordained for you.

Finding Peace and Balance Everyday

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